Terakeet Chief Executive Officer MacLaren Cummings (left) and Terakeet Chief Technology Officer Patrick Danial (right) at their office in Syracuse.

Back in ancient times — before TV, that is — the phone company was the Internet, and the Yellow Pages functioned as Google. To get noticed, you bought a full-page ad or leap-frogged the competition alphabetically, by changing your name.

Thus was born a generation of companies titled “AAA” — arguably, the first search engine optimizers.

Today, Google guards its search engine algorithms the way KFC protects its 11 herbs and spices, and to get noticed on the Internet requires more than an “A” in your name. Also, the stakes — being listed not to a city but the world — were never greater.

And the job of influencing those Google searches could be the future of downtown Syracuse. Yes, you read correctly: This is an Internet story — not from Berkeley or Boston, but Syracuse. Downtown Syracuse.

There, an 11-year-old company, Terakeet Corp., has tripled its work force in three years, expanding its national footprint and crystallizing the urban renaissance fantasies that have been touted for decades by local political and business leaders.

In Armory Square, the company’s 33-year-old co-founder says the growth is just beginning.

“It may sound crazy,” chief executive officer MacLaren Cummings said recently. “But I think that we have the capability, if we make the right steps, to make this a billion dollar company in the next five to 10 years.”

Billion. Ten years. Crazy, or what?

Three years ago, the company had nine employees. Now, it has 32, estimated revenues in the tens of millions and an A-list of national clients, such as Coca-Cola Co., American Express Co., NBC Universal-Orlando and General Electric Co.

Plus, it has friends in high places. Really high places.

Four years ago, Cummings carved out a reputation as the search engine guru who helped transform Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign website into a fund-raising powerhouse. He signed on for a three-day stint. That lasted several months, working without compensation. After Clinton left the race, Cummings was snapped up by the Obama campaign, again footing his own bills.

He’s been called back to work for the president’s re-election, consulting in a campaign whose total cost could hit more than $1 billion.

Nevertheless, Cummings says his work for Obama won’t pay off in dollars, but in business contacts. Be they Republican or Democratic, captains of industry generally figure the guy who helps run a presidential campaign website knows what he’s doing.

“There is a certain prestige involved with being part of a political campaign, especially one that is regarded as highly technical,” said Cummings, a Tully native who attended Manlius-Pebble Hill High School and graduated from Cornell University in 2001. “There is a certain sizzle factor with potential customers. … The fact that a campaign of that magnitude would hire a firm like ours, I think, says something.”

On South Clinton Street, Terakeet quietly has expanded to take up two stories of the Neal and Hyde Building, which is mostly known for its ground floor, the Syracuse Suds Factory. But within the area business community, the company’s profile has soared.

“It’s part of the foundation for our future growth,” said Rob Simpson, president of the Center State Corp. for Economic Opportunity, a regional business organization. “You have a young entrepreneur who started here and is growing his business here. … They’re growing and expanding, doing everything right.”

Full Article at Syracuse.com

SYRACUSE, NY – The Post-Standard – Progress 2012

Original Video

In Armory Square, Terakeet Corp. has tripled its work force in three years, expanding its national footprint in the business of search engine optimization — or SEO — the art of raising clients’ profiles on Google Internet searches. The company, with 32 employees and a scattered army of free-lancers, boasts an A-list of national clients, such as Coca-Cola, American Express, NBC Universal-Orlando and General Electric. Also, it’s co-founder, 32-year-old MacLaren Cummings, made a name for himself in the 2008 presidential election, when he directed the fund-raising components of the websites for the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns. Video by David Lassman.

By Patrick Danial

An entire army of Roman slaves is murdered at the behest of a Roman general’s inability to identify his defector. This is the result of the climactic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic classic, Spartacus. In a demonstration of conformity, hundreds of slaves rise and stand alongside Spartacus to protect him from crucifixion. Of course, grave misfortune quickly falls on all.

How does the Google Empire begin to determine ownership and trust as they attempt to weave a new social graph? Much like a hyperlink endorsement, the task at hand requires an ability to understand the new footprint an individual or brand leaves across the web. Today, our contributions to the digital medium bleed well beyond the white fences of our canonical homes. Syndication, social sharing, paraphrasing, and sourcing create added confusion for search spiders attempting to identify the author of any media asset, let alone the true reputation and authority of the referencing source. Too much ambiguity in ownership and you’re quickly swallowed in the vast sea of SERPs or, worse, penalized.

This is not to say you need focus on the purveyors of your hard work; much like a backlink profile there inevitably will be instances of automated scraping and spam—all of which is very natural and expected. Rather, its time we begin to explore the likely signals and referential elements that are within our control.

The Reputation and Collaboration Dilemma

Collaborative technology has allowed for the rapid growth of most large-scale knowledge platforms, such as Google Maps and Wikipedia. It is also what will, eventually, deliver us the semantic-web as Google, and others, attempt to catalog ‘an internet of things’ through various crowd-sourcing task services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  But how are they to effectively establish ‘who’ is contributing and whether or not their value-add checks-out? Wikipedia is riddled with inaccuracies and grammatical gaffes, but lives in a much more controlled environment laden with editors in contrast to when you’re attempting to make sense of what people are saying and doing on websites you do not control.

Establishing reputation is, of course, a tricky art. For example, a research paper entitled “Reputation Systems for Open Collaboration”, the original WikiTrust algorithm of Wikipedia, was “…open to many attacks that allowed users to gain reputation while doing no useful work (or worse, while damaging the system).”. The self-creation of errors and omissions through a ‘dummy’ account, later to be corrected with an account in good standing, quickly inflates reputation scores. It was determined that reputation scoring be shifted to, rather, measure contribution quality by analyzing “standard edit distances between revisions” and “differentiate between word insertions and deletions”.

But how does this fit into the broader context of the web’s endlessly growing list of contributors? And how do we ensure our work is properly given credit and garnering positive quality scores?

Here are a few simple best practice authorship mechanisms to consider as you push your work out to the web:

The web is fickle and, unfortunately, still too easy to game. However, it’s not worth chasing nearsighted techniques inevitably landing you on Google’s short-list. Instead, by analyzing quality-control and value-scoring methods proven within limited, controlled, environments (e.g. Wikipedia, Google Maps), you can begin to anticipate where the broader indexing community will look for improvement. While striving for quality in what you publish is a given, don’t be shy in laying claim to your work; use everything available to help automated systems begin correlating who you are, who knows you, and what you’re talking about. From there, it’s about amplifying the discussion.

As for Kirk Douglas, his fate was likely still destined had he acknowledged himself that day among the slaves; perhaps then, though, he’d have saved a few more lives before martyrdom.

For nearly 75 years, Gym Source has built more gyms for more people than any other fitness equipment company in the world. As America’s largest commercial provider of fitness equipment, Gym Source serves a wide range of clients- from Fortune 500 companies to the Federal Reserve, Equinox to the Armed Forces. With over 300,000 clients in all 50 States and over 50 countries, Gym Source is the proven authority in fitness equipment.

Business Challenge:
Gym Source desired to expand their brand and physical retail locations into new markets. The company invested significantly in a new website to support these objectives. However, Gym Source was not in the position to create and implement expansion strategies because they needed to first increase their brand visibility online.

Terakeet Approach:
Terakeet saw a great opportunity to utilize their technology driven strategy to expand Gym Source’s online visibility. By leveraging proprietary in-house software, Terakeet was efficiently able to identify a large number of existing and new relationships to target with compelling outreach.

Results:
Gym Source saw huge improvements in their search engine presence and intelligent visibility of how their online efforts can accelerate expansion into new markets. Gym Source was able to achieve the number one organic ranking for ‘fitness equipment’ and increase the number of Google visits by almost 100%! Terakeet was able to broaden coverage by expanding the non-branded keyword combinations by 250%. As a result of this online presence and intelligent visibility, Gym Source has built an online community and supported their expansion into new markets.

Customer Testimonial

“We started working with Terakeet over 5 years ago when we were just beginning to market to our customers via the web. We were one of the first in our industry to do it and are now the nation’s largest retailer of gym equipment. Over the years Terakeet has become a partner and a friend; demonstrating flexibility on a number of occasions to accommodate our evolving strategies. We continue to rely on Terakeet for a myriad of technology needs.”

“While custom software is still a big part of our business, the website needed to speak more clearly to the work we’ve done in the web and SEO space,” said CEO Mac Cummings. “We’ve had the great fortune of working with some really unique clients over the years, from entrepreneurial companies much like ours, to mid-size and Fortune 500 companies, as well as recognizable political figures. We thought it was time to try to simplify our message as it relates to ‘who we are and what we do’, and hopefully in the process give visitors and potential clients a better idea of how we can help them.”

Terakeet is a company based on innovation and has created groundbreaking business solutions for today’s leading companies. At the core of Terakeet’s innovative solutions is an expertise in strategic web development, software development, and search engine optimization. Terakeet engineers apply the latest tools and technologies to improve workflow, create efficiencies, launch new products and services, and obtain greater market share for its clients, thereby enabling its clients to grow and profit.

For more information about Terakeet, please call (800) 655-2724, contact us, or send an email to info [a] terakeet.net.

The system is provided by Destiny USA, and the company hopes to offer it to many other new stores opening within the eight-story shopping complex as well. It incorporates two types of RFID technology: active ultra-wideband (UWB) tags and readers provided by Time Domain Corp., known as the Precision Location Ultra Wideband System (PLUS), and an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID system with Avery Dennison passive tags and Impinj interrogators. The Destiny USA Technology Platform ties these two systems together using a software platform provided by New York software firm Terakeet.

With its RFID deployment, Clothing for a Better Earth is also serving as a showcase for what the technology can do, and has invited other retailers to come take a look and consider how they could use RFID within their own space. The goal, says Pat Danial, Terakeet’s chief technology officer and co-founder, is to provide the system at numerous stores within the Carousel Center, part of a 1.3 million-square-foot mall complex under construction.

Clothing for a Better Earth, a new company that offers apparel made from natural, organic fibers, opened its first branch at a temporary 1,100-square-foot location in an open-air section of the mall, while a new area is being constructed, explains Frank Fiumano, the retailer’s general manager. The store opened last year on so-called Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving. With RFID, shoppers can track their own purchases, as well as learn about other products they might consider buying, and the store can gain data regarding shopper behavior, while also tracking its own inventory.

Full Article at RFID Journal

A 1,000-square-foot room with translucent flooring contains what appears to be a small clothing store with just two products — T-shirts and cloth handbags with the words “Surrender the past” printed on them. But what makes the “store” unique isn’t the see-through floor. It’s the technology behind the walls, under the shelves and attached to each T-shirt and handbag.

Through the use of a radio frequency identification system, the store can track what products a customer picks up, instantly send detailed information and customer reviews of those products to the shopper’s iPhone, and make suggestions, via nearby computer screens, of other products that might interest the customer.

The system even tracks customers as they walk through the store and displays on the computer screens items, in their size and preferred fabrics, that they might want to consider, based on their past shopping habits.

At the self-checkout desk, the customer just drops merchandise on the desk and an antenna built into the desk picks up a radio signal from a sticker attached to each of the items and rings them up. There are no UPC symbols to scan.

The customer swipes a credit card through a reader and the sale is complete.

Full Article at Syracuse.com

Danial, co-founder and chief technology officer of Terakeet Corp., has been at the forefront of the Syracuse company’s expansion beyond its roots as a developer of speech-recognition software for customer call centers.

Danial, along with co-founder and Chief Executive Officer MacLaren Cummings, have enlarged the company into a provider of custom software.

Terakeet’s bread and butter remains its speech-recognition software, which allows call centers to do more with fewer people by automating much of their work.
But the company has launched a search engine optimization service. The service changes clients’ Web sites to increase the volume of traffic that comes from search engine results.

Full article at Syacuse.com

Wildlife Trust For more than three decades, Wildlife Trust has been a conservation leader, working to protect ecosystems and all the inhabitants that depend on them. With a multitude of projects in over a dozen countries, Wildlife Trust aims to improve humankind’s ability to save nature and protect ecological health in a world that is increasingly fragmented and dominated by humans. The Wildlife Trust works with local leaders and scientists in the U.S. and abroad, researching the delicate balance between wildlife, ecosystem and human health.

Terakeet is a company based on innovation and has created groundbreaking business solutions for today’s leading companies. At the core of Terakeet’s innovative solutions is an expertise in strategic web development, software development, and search engine optimization. Terakeet engineers apply the latest tools and technologies to improve workflow, create efficiencies, launch new products and services, and obtain greater market share for its clients, thereby enabling its clients to grow and profit.

CherryPharm is a science-based company committed to pursuing and leveraging academic research on the natural health benefits of tart cherries into great tasting and clinically proven juices. Its innovative juice extraction and pouring technique has been designed to protect the naturally potent but fragile cherry compounds. The end result? The best tasting and most powerful cherry juice available.

Terakeet is a company based on innovation and has created groundbreaking business solutions for today’s leading companies. At the core of Terakeet’s innovative solutions is an expertise in strategic web development, software development, and search engine optimization. Terakeet engineers apply the latest tools and technologies to improve workflow, create efficiencies, launch new products and services, and obtain greater market share for its clients, thereby enabling its clients to grow and profit.